Time we switched to unicode? (was Explanation of this Python language feature?)

[Rhodri James]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 06:12:50 -0000, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Because the shorter symbols lend themselves better to the
> "super-tokenization" where you don't read the individual parts but the
> whole. The difference between "40" and "forty" is minimal, but the
> difference between "86400" and "eighty-six thousand [and] four
> hundred" is significant; the first is a single token, which you could
> then instantly recognize as the number of seconds in a day (leap
> seconds aside), but the second is a lengthy expression.

It's not quite that simple, sadly (for me).  I have mild dyscalculia,  
which in my case is another way of saying that collections of digits  
*aren't* tokens to me unless I ascribe a specific meaning to them.  I  
don't work with day-level time differences a lot, so 86400 is just a  
string of digits to me.  Powers of two and one less than powers of two I  
use a lot, so 65535 for example is a token.  The more digits there are in  
the number, the harder it is for me to take in in a way that doesn't  
happen with letters.  Even "forty" is better than "40" if you want me to  
recall it!

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses